ShippingEasy customers can add their own customer or user lists to the company's systems at any time.

Purpose-Built for E-Commerce

ShippingEasy's automated email funtionality was "designed and built exclusively for e-commerce companies," Zaleski said. Because ShippingEasy is cloud-based and uses the Software as a Service model, "no installed hardware or databases are needed."

The company's customer management module, including the new automated email marketing tool, is priced at US$9 to $49 per month, depending on the number of orders a customer processes.

"Unlike many competitors, customers can have an unlimited number of subscribers and lists," Zaleski pointed out.

Target Market

The automated email marketing tool is geared toward small business e-commerce firms. It's mainly used to target consumers, but it could be used in a B2B environment, Zaleski said.

That said, automated email marketing "seems to have much more resonance in the B2C space," noted Frost's Jude. "It's largely supplanted the traditional fliers people used to receive in the mail."

Automated email marketing wouldn't work as well in the B2B environment, he suggested, because "it's very hard to target the right people, and purchases are mostly a pull kind of thing, not push."

ShippingEasy's automated email marketing tool is "a convenient time-saver that also boosts customer service for small businesses or the network of individual sellers," said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

"These small businesses are resource-challenged," she told CRM Buyer, "when it does to designing and executing emails to customers for offers or related products, or informing them of shipping status."

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.